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I loved the gloopy honey, which we ate with walnuts. Down on the river at the Karshat end were
water buffaloes. There was also a shed with a wooden waterwheel providing power to turn huge
millstones to grind wheat and maize into flour, which young boys would then pour into sacks. Next to
that was a smaller shed containing a panel with a confusion of wires sprouting from it. The village
received no electricity from the government so many villagers got their power from these makeshift
hydroelectric projects.
As the day went on and the sun climbed higher in the sky, more and more of the White Mountain
would be bathed in golden sun. Then as evening came it fell in shadow as the sun moved up the Black
Mountain. We timed our prayers by the shadow on the mountains. When the sun hit a certain rock, we
used to say our asr or afternoon prayers. Then in the evening, when the white peak of Spin Ghar was
even more beautiful than in the morning, we said the makkam or evening prayers. You could see the
White Mountain from everywhere, and my father told me he used to think of it as a symbol of peace
for our land, a white flag at the end of our valley. When he was a child he thought this small valley
was the entire world and that if anyone went beyond the point where either mountain kissed the sky,
they would fall off.
Though I had been born in a city, I shared my father’s love of nature. I loved the rich soil, the
greenness of the plants, the crops, the buffaloes and the yellow butterflies that fluttered about me as I
walked. The village was very poor, but when we arrived our extended family would lay on a big
feast. There would be bowls of chicken, rice, local spinach and spicy mutton, all cooked over the fire
by the women, followed by plates of crunchy apples, slices of yellow cake and a big kettle of milky
tea. None of the children had toys or books. The boys played cricket in a gully and even the ball was
made from plastic bags tied together with elastic bands.
The village was a forgotten place. Water was carried from the spring. The few concrete houses had
been built by families whose sons or fathers had gone south to work in the mines or to the Gulf, from
where they sent money home. There are forty million of us Pashtuns, of which ten million live outside
our homeland. My father said it was sad that they could never return as they needed to keep working
to maintain their families’ new lifestyle. There were many families with no men. They would visit
only once a year, and usually a new baby would arrive nine months later.
Scattered up and down the hills there were houses made of wattle and daub, like my grandfather’s,
and these often collapsed when there were floods. Children sometimes froze to death in winter. There
was no hospital. Only Shahpur had a clinic, and if anyone fell ill in the other villages they had to be
carried there by their relatives on a wooden frame which we jokingly called the Shangla Ambulance.
If it was anything serious they would have to make the long bus journey to Mingora unless they were
lucky enough to know someone with a car.
Usually politicians only visited during election time, promising roads, electricity, clean water and
schools and giving money and generators to influential local people we called stakeholders, who
would instruct their communities on how to vote. Of course this only applied to the men; women in
our area don’t vote. Then they disappeared off to Islamabad if they were elected to the National
Assembly, or Peshawar for the Provincial Assembly, and we’d hear no more of them or their
promises.
My cousins made fun of me for my city ways. I did not like going barefoot. I read books and I had a
different accent and used slang expressions from Mingora. My clothes were often from shops and not
home-made like theirs. My relatives would ask me, ‘Would you like to cook chicken for us?’ and I’d